Okay, the book has undergone some changes since my first concept. The publisher did an amazing job of laying the book out. The first change that was presented to me was the cover. Although the changes were minor, they looked great. So, here it is – you decide:

I love the way that they designed this. I like the inset photo of Gerry Niel of Mint Hill, North Carolina shooting a photograph on the shipwreck, Lana Carol – a scallop boat that sank in a Thanksgiving storm and the purple jellyfish on the spine.

Before I go further, I should explain that the book is going to be hard cover, 11” x 8 1/2”, with 166 pages and 235 color photographs. Schiffer Publishing has been a joy to work with. Everyone there has been incredible.

Some of you may have looked at my original design and a lot of you voted for the front cover. The main image used was chosen from your votes. I had pictured a North American lobster for the back cover but the Schiffer designers had another idea and I liked it better than mine. The lobster image is the last image on the inside of the book. The new back cover is:

The image of the lined anemones and blue mussels is pretty cool and it enhances the “Garden State” theme. Now, you can buy the book anywhere but if you want a signed copy, you will have to attend a book signing (none are planned yet but there will be) or purchase the book from my site when it is available. If you would like to be notified when the book is available, please fill out the contact info form below. This information will only be used to notify you of book availability and nothing else.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Since I am batch scanning my slides, I didn’t notice soon enough that many of these jellies had blown out highlights which I was trying to fix in Photoshop. Unfortunately, once highlights have no data in them, there aren’t any real good ways to fix the images. I found a way to adjust my scanner to deal with these highlights. It’s makes my post processing a little more involved but it allows me to have useful images where, without the change, I would have discarded them.

The image above is my normal settings for VueScan. They work pretty well for most things but not so well for this eight-ribbed hydromedusa. This is a small jellyfish – not more than one-quarter inch in diameter. Scanning at these setting produced the following image:

I cropped a small section of the image so that I could show how bad the scan is.

The whites are completely blown out and the image could not be saved.

I tried adjusting the image using “Levels” but using the black point eye dropper for the darkest part of the image still left the whites unusable.

There was also an additional marine invertebrate in the image that I could not identify with this scan.

This is the only image that I have of an eight-ribbed hydromedusa so it was important for me to try and save it.

I tried different settings in VueScan and come up with one that I really liked:

It was the  same setting that I used for normal scanning with the exception of changing my “white point” from a setting of “1” to a setting of “0.03.” That produced an image that looks like this:

The eight ribs of the hydromedusa are not blown out and now you can see the hitchhiker which I believe to be a juvenile long-finned squid.

After the initial scan, I was not able to use my standard batch processing of images in Adobe Photoshop CS5 as it also tended to blow out some of the highlights but not nearly as bad as my original scan.

I processed the image manually in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and used “Shadows and Highlights” to make my adjustments.

The final image is:

I think that I achieved the result that I was after. I had already scanned my slides of sea gooseberries and purple jellyfish and found that there were many in both directories with blown out highlights so I went ahead a rescanned the images using my new settings. I saved the settings in VueScan and named the settings “blownouthighlights.ini” so that I could use the settings for future scanning.

Here is another example of purple jellyfish that I was able to use after scanning using my blown out highlights setting. This is the raw scan:

Now the finished image after Photoshop editing:

My original scan of this jellyfish was so blown out that it was unusable. I found that I could scan all the images in this category using the blown out highlights settings and processing them in Photoshop. There was a little extra work but the ease of editing the formerly blown out images was worth the extra effort.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

This is the photo of the bell of a lion’s mane jellyfish. There are two hitchhikers aboard the jellyfish. There is a Chaetognatha (below), Spadella cephaloptera, which is also known as an arrow worm. Arrow worms are transparent or translucent dart-shaped animals covered by a cuticle. They are predatory marine worms that are a major component of plankton worldwide.

The chaetognatha was cool but it wasn’t what I was excited about. In the upper left hand corner is a tiny, baby long-finned squid, Loligo pealei.

I have never seen a squid in New Jersey. I have seen their eggs but that is it. I am estimating that the squid was 1/4” to 1/2” long. I have a few other shots of the same jellyfish but from different angles. It is more difficult to see that it is a squid in the other photos but since they were taken one-after-the-other of the same jellyfish, I assumed that what I have is a view of the squid with its tentacles tucked underneath its body.

Now that I know what a baby squid looks like, I have found it on another photo. I missed it on the first scan because of the way that the scanner exposed the image. It blew out all the white areas. I rescanned using manual settings (this will be the subject of an upcoming blog) and lo and behold-there was another juvenile squid.

This is an eight-ribbed hydromedusa. It is the only photo that I have of one and our little hitchhiker is aboard.

So this was just one of the exciting things that I am experiencing as I continue on my quest. I will be bringing more to this site as I find them.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

On the plus side is seeing images that I made twenty years ago. I always thought that I could remember every image that I have taken but was I wrong! I look at some of these images and go “Wow, did I really take that picture?”

Before I started this project, I used to scan one slide at a time. That led me to only scan enough slides for each subcategory to fill one page in my web site photo gallery. That was a maximum of twenty images. The rest resided in albums. When I originally scanned the slides, I wasn’t aware about the importance of IPTC information embedded in digital files. I burned all the scanned slides as TIFF files onto CD’s and did not keep a copy on my PC. Every time I needed one of the digital files, I copied it off the CD to my hard drive and used it. That meant that I would need to add all the caption and image information to the file before sending it out. It took what should have been a five-minute project and made it a 30-minute task. Earlier this year, I decided to move all the images from the CD’s to my computer and get everything captioned and labeled. I am glad that I did it as I had a few CD’s that I could not read anymore which meant rescanning the original slides.

I was talking to my son, Tom, the other day about my project. He is recovering from a traumatic brain injury and I am constantly amazed with his progress. I asked if he knew why I was going to scan all my slides. My answer to him would have been that they are not doing me any good in albums on a shelf in my office. I need to get them on the web so that they can be seen. His answer to me about my reasoning was “for ease of access to the images.” I started to correct him but when I thought about what he said, I realized that this was the most important reason. Yesterday, his assessment was tested. I needed to upload 25 high resolution files to a Dropbox account. Some of them would have been on CD’s and it would have been a lot of work to get them in the condition required for delivery. Instead, I opened up my Dropbox folder and dragged and dropped images into it. I was done with my upload in less than 30 minutes. How great is that. Before I move on, if you have not heard about Dropbox, it a site where you can get 2 GB of storage space on the cloud. All you need is a gmail account. You can use this space to back up your computer files or to share photos or files with friends. I have been using it as a backup destination for my phone data and also for sharing with friends.

Once I realized how many slides I had to scan, I sat down and developed a work flow to make things easier. Here’s how it goes. I use Vuescan to batch scan slides with a Nikon 5000ED scanner with a Nikon SF-210 slide feeder. I can scan fifty slides at a time. Since all my slides are divided into categories like Fish, Invertebrates, Rays, Turtles, Marine Mammals, etc., I do each category and subcategory separately. Subcategories of fish would be Band Sea Bass, Black Sea Bass, etc. I could scan much faster if I just put fifty slides in at a time and scanned them all into a generic folder and then separated them afterwards. I hadn’t thought of doing that until just now and I may change my workflow in that direction. One of the hassles of doing things the way that I am now is that when I have subcategories with only a few slides, it is tedious to make a new folder, scan three slides, process those three and then move on.

Okay, I batch scan all the slides in a subcategory. Each slide is scanned at 4000 dpi and at 16 bits. The scanned image file is approximate 130 mb in size and are 1.3” x 0.9” at 4000 dpi. After scanning, I rename each slide to accommodate my current labeling system, add descriptions, keywords, copyright information, etc. For this I use IMatch. I have been using this program for a long time and it is extremely flexible and powerful.

As an example shown above, I can take all my images in a subcategory and assign them to categories. I the case above, the great barracuda images in this category are assigned to “Animals” “Fishes” “Marine” Barracuda (Sphyraenidae)” “Great Barracuda” and “Sphyraena barracuda.” I also assign other categories to the images such as “Location” “Oceans” “Atlantic” “South Carolina” etc. Once I have checked off the categories that I want for the images, I run a script called “Copy IMatch categories to IPTC keywords.”

All the categories that I assigned are now keywords in each image. If all the images were taken of the same subject and the image caption is the same for all, I would open the IMatch IPTC editor and add the remainder of the information that I want:

I entered the caption information and all the other criteria (except the object name which is the image number) and press the “Close” button and IMatch adds the information to the IPTC section of each image.

Now that I have completed my labeling work, I now have to process the images. When I was scanning one image at a time, I would open each individually in Photoshop and make all my adjustments. If I did this with the approximately 25,000 slides that I have, I would be at this forever. So I came up with another plan of action. I use a filter in Photoshop named “Perfectly Clear.” I have been very pleased with the way it processes and image. I run a batch program from Adobe Bridge to process each image in a folder using the Perfectly Clear filter.

Just a heads up, since my scanning process will go on for quite awhile, I am going to be adding some of the scanned photos to my blog posts and will probably be doing posts about the images themselves.

After the images are process with the filter, I open each one individually and crop each image to 8” x 12” at 300 dpi, and do all my usual Photoshop operations like spot removal, backscatter removal, etc.

I have an incredible sequence of a monkfish eating a black sea bass. What I forgot was that there were images in that sequence that I never scanned. This is one of them. The sea bass is in the monkfish’s throat and he is swallowing it. I scanned the image before this one and the image after but not this one. It was one of my “Wow” finds.

My wife, Veronica, and I would stop at the “2M” buoy about a mile outside of Manasquan Inlet. We usually stopped on an incoming tide which was when the water was the clearest around the buoy.

Other boaters would stop and ask if we were in trouble or did the person in the water need rescuing. Veronica and I would just laugh because they never realized what we could see beneath the surface.

On this day, we were blessed with the presence of an ocean sunfish (Mola mola). They are gentle giants that reach a height of ten feet from top fin tip  to bottom fin tip and a weight of 2000 pounds. They feed on jellyfish so they are no threat to humans.

While I was snorkeling, Veronica had a real treat. She saw the ocean sunfish breach out of the water. I have never seen that behavior and I am really glad that she got to see it. Like many animal encounters, you just have to be in the right place at the right time. I did not realize until I started scanning how many images that I have of ocean sunfish. The crazy thing is that I have seen one in a few years. It’s not because they are not there but because I am not in the right place at the right time.

Sea Ravens are members of the scorpionfish family. They come in four colors: brown, tan, yellow and red. The brown and tan are the most common. They yellow would be the next most common and the least common is the red variety.

Underwater, colors are lost as you go deeper in the water column. One of the first colors lost is red. It is lost at a depth of about ten feet. This red sea raven looks very dark colored. You can see the red color by shining a light on the fish. Photographers have to use a flash to get the red color in the photograph.

Now that I have gone off on a tangent, I am going to return to my slide scanning stories. First, if you have as many slides as I do to scan, you really need to either send them out and pay to have them done or purchase a quality scanner like the Nikon 5000ED and a slide feeder like the Nikon SF210. I don’t think that I would have undertaken this task with those two pieces of equipment. The bad part to purchasing the scanner and feeder is that they are not made anymore and you have to search places like EBay to find them. Additionally, they cost more now used than they did new. My two units together with shipping cost $2800.00. New, they were just shy of $1700.00. The plus side is that when your scanning project is done, you can sell them on EBay and retrieve a good part of your purchase price back. The other two things that I am finding invaluable in this project is the Vuescan scanning software and the IMatch image database program.

That’s all for today.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Okay, so I have time on my hands. What did I do with it? I created a new screensaver. It is titled “Mid-Atlantic Marine Fish.” I took about fifty photos and made them into a Windows screensaver. Here is the title screen that I use.

A number of the images in this collage are in the screensaver. I would appreciate any feedback from those of you who download this screensaver. I believe that I will be doing a few more including New Jersey Artificial Reefs 2, Mid-Atlantic Invertebrates, and a few others that are in the planning stage. The screensaver has settings that can be changed such as including different transitions and changing how long each image is on the screen. I hope that you like it.

To install, download the exe file here. Save it to your hard drive and double-click it to run and follow the prompts. After it is installed, you will have a number of options.

Click on the “Settings” button and you will see:

Under the “General” tab, you can change how long each image is on the screen and whether they should be shown sequentially, randomly or whether the images should be shuffled (different order on each pass). Click the “Position” tab and you will see:

You will have the option to change the size of the image. Each selection is self-explanatory. Click on the “Effects”  tab:

The “Effects” tab allows you to change and/or set the transitions between images. The default setting is “Crossfade” only.

The default setting for the screensaver is “No Sound” but you can add your own music to the screensaver and have choices for repeating, shuffling or playing one random playlist item.

The “Behavior” tab changes how the screensaver reacts to the mouse, keyboard and the escape key. Clicking the “About” button brings up the following which is self-explanatory.

Finally, clicking the “Website” button takes you to my home page on my website.

Please let me know what you think of the screensaver. By the way, the screensaver is only for the PC, it does not work on the MAC. Sorry!

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

This was one of the photos that I am not especially happy with but it is the one time that I dove and photographed subway cars sunk off New Jersey as artificial reefs and I wanted to make the photo look better. I thought that I would give Nik HDR Efex Pro a try and see what I could do. The plugin opens under the “File” “Automate” “Merge to HDR Efex Pro” menu in Photoshop CS5.

The plugin starts and presents a menu to choose the photos to merge into an HDR image.

Click on the “Select” button and choose your images:

I chose the three images that are shown above. Click “OK” and the process starts. If the program cannot determine the correct exposure differences, it will present the following screen. It could not tell the difference in exposure in this case because I took the initial exposure and manually corrected for +1 and –1 exposures and saved the over and underexposed images as separate files. If I actually took these three photos at different exposure settings, the program would be able to get the information from the photo’s metadata:

I manually keyed in the correct changes in exposure and then clicked the “OK” button. HDR Efex Pro has 33 presets that you can choose from. I will show the results of a few that I thought were interesting:

The photo above is the default effect created by blending the three images together. It looks much better than the original photo. The photo below is called “Night on Earth” effect. I liked this one a lot because it darkened the areas of the photo were backscatter is prominent:

I also liked the “End of the Road” effect. It is similar to “Night on Earth” but it adds some warmth to the photo:

You do not need three different images to accomplish the same results. You can choose one image at normal exposure and run the HDR Efex Pro plugin and end up with similar results. I ran the single image and found that I liked the results better using the three different exposures. For example, here is the “End of the Road” effect using a single image. Compare it to the one above using three separate exposures:

There is clearly a difference but I don’t think that the difference is huge. I wanted to see how this would work on an image taken in clear water so I chose a photo that I took of the shipwreck of the Oro Verde in Grand Cayman. I created one photo with a +1 f-stop exposure and a second of a –1 f-stop exposure and brought those along with the original image into HDR Efex Pro.

Here are a few of the results that I liked:

Notice the detail in the front of the wreck where there were heavier shadows before.

I like this better than the default image. It is a little darker and the water is a more vibrant blue. For a crazier look, check out “Night on Earth” effect on this photo:

The “Night on Earth” effect causes vignetting (dark areas) in the corners. The next effect is very similar without the vignetting.

The “End of the Road” effect puts this wreck into perspective. It really was the end of the road for the Oro Verde although it can be argued that since it now is a haven for marine life, perhaps it’s just a fork in the road.

I was going to end this here but I thought that it would be interesting to try this on something different. I have a photo of a southern stingray on the bottom in Grand Cayman with the live aboard dive boat, Cayman Aggressor IV in the background. Let’s see what HDR Efex Pro can do with that. First, I created one stop under and one stop overexposure images:

I loaded the images into the plugin and here are a few of the results:

I found that there were some very interesting prospects among the 33 presets. I am going to be spending more time with this plugin.

Will HDR Efex Pro make all of your photos better? No, but it can really make them look different and in this day and age, different is okay. Until next time, have fun shooting and being creative.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

I have a lot of work ahead of me in the coming months. I have a preview of the book that you can see here. This is the way that I perceive the book but I am not sure that it will end up like this. Schiffer Publishing Ltd. editor’s will do the layout.

This book has been the culmination of forty years of scuba diving and photographing in the Atlantic waters off my home state of New Jersey. I have seen and photographed some amazing things. One of the areas that I love the most is the surface and mid-water. This is where I find my favorite subjects – jellyfish and plankton. I have spent entire dives hanging on the anchor line at fifteen or twenty feet and loving every second of it. When I was shooting film and using a Nikonos camera, it was easier to capture some of the really small things like the one-half-inch long naked sea butterfly since the Nikonos camera had macro capability with a wired framer. I just had to get the subject between the uprights of the framer and take the photo. Although this is much more difficult with a housed digital SLR, I am thoroughly enjoying the challenge.

The book is full of some of my crazy dive stories like when my wife, Veronica and I were snorkeling around the 2M buoy off Manasquan Inlet. We observed numerous fish and an ocean sunfish circling the buoy. Other boaters stopped to ask if we were in trouble. None had thought that the view below the surface was so wonderful. On another occasion, I was swimming over the deck of the USS Algol more than eighteen miles off shore. The deck was covered with baby scallops and I moved over them, many clasped their shells together and squirted up into the water column.

I have a great photograph of two baby Forbes’ sea stars in a mussel shell with two arms of a much larger Forbes’ sea star above them. I like to think that the large sea star is the mother telling it’s two babies that they can’t go out and play until they finish their meal and clean up the shell that they are in.

One of my favorite dives was on the two locomotives off Long Branch, New Jersey. On a few occasions during my diving career, I have been completed speechless when viewing something that takes my breath away. The locomotives did this for me. They sat upright on the bottom about fifteen feet apart and were covered with sea anemones. The sight was one of unbelievable beauty. Schools of black sea bass swam around and under the locomotives. I stood looking at them for nearly ten minutes before I started to photograph.

This is a one-of-a-kind book. Very few people have spent as much time as I have photographing the New Jersey marine community. You will see fish, invertebrates, mollusks, crustaceans, sharks, turtles, seahorses, artificial reefs and shipwrecks. I hope that many of you will enjoy having the book as I enjoyed creating it.

I am collecting names, email addresses and/or mailing addresses for anyone that might have an interest in purchasing the book. There is no obligation to buy. It is only to notify you when the book is available. The contact information will go no farther than from me to the publisher and will not be used for any other reason. You can sign up at the contact form here.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

The first screensaver is West Indian Manatees. There are four photos. You can download the file here or from my “Downloads & Most Popular Page.”

The same screensaver is available in black-and-white for the original Nook. You can download it here or from my “Downloads & Most Popular Page.”

My second Nook screensaver is Marine Life 3 Color. It also has four images and can be downloaded here or from my “Downloads & Most Popular Page.”

The Marine Life screensaver is also available in black-and-white and can be downloaded here or from my “Downloads & Most Popular Page.”

The third screensaver is “Jellyfish and Plankters” for the Nook Color. You can download it here or from my “Downloads & Most Popular Page.”

The “Jellyfish and Plankters” screensaver is also available in black-and-white for the original Nook. You can download it here or from my “Downloads & Most Popular Page.”

If you need directions on how to install the screensaver on your Nook, please go to a previous blog where I detailed the installation. Click here to go to that page.

I don’t own a Nook Color so I would appreciate any feedback that you can supply as to how the images work. If they need to be modified, I will do that and upload the new files. As always, enjoy!

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

The first thing that should be considered is the fold in the middle of the two pages. My green moray eel on the left is facing towards  the inside of  the book. Most people would not notice why there is a problem but it is because the moray’s mouth gets lost in the fold. It would have been very easy to flip the photo horizontally and have the eel facing in the other direction.

I flipped the green moray eel horizontally and then moved the text to the other side of the page. It makes it look much better. The eel doesn’t get lost in the fold.

In this photo, the octopus on the left gets lost in the center fold of the book. It actually looks better here than it does in the book.

I flipped the octopus horizontally and moved the text and it looks a lot better.

Here is another problem  that I corrected although it may be more of personal preference.

I had the juvenile blue tang (bottom left) going in the opposite direction as the adult and I felt that it would look better with both fish going in the same direction so:

I like the flow much better with both fish going in the same direction.

Flipping photos isn’t always the answer with every photo. Take scuba divers for instance. You can’t flip their pages because their hoses would be on the wrong side of their body.

I flipped the photo horizontally. The text will also flip but I want you to see what happens to the diver’s breathing hose.

Scuba divers have their breathing hose coming over their right shoulder. If you are not a diver, you wouldn’t notice but if you are, you probably would and I wouldn’t want it to happen.

I also found that the layouts in MyPublisher was not as flexible as I wanted. For example, in the photo above, you could not group the three photos and get the text where it is. I decided to lay out the book in Adobe InDesign. The more I  use the program, the happier I am with it. I could lay out a single page or multiple pages and then export them as high quality jpeg files which I would place into the MyPublisher book. This worked extremely well until I did an entire book in Adobe InDesign and I wanted to export all the pages (50) to jpeg files that I could place into a MyPublisher book. I googled to find if there was a program that might help and there was.

I found it at an Adobe InDesign Scripts page. It allowed me to output all the pages in my book as high resolution jpegs. I was able to number them using a prefix like “portfolio” with a number following it that increased sequentially. It worked very well. Once the pages were exported, I opened up MyPublisher and placed each page into the book. It went very fast.

It helped even more when MyPublisher came out with a great deal. They offered a Deluxe Hard Cover book with unlimited pages for $70.00 plus shipping and tax. I thought about my portfolio book. Here was a chance to reprint it with the changes that I made as well as with additional pages. Many of my relatives have been asking about a coffee table book of my underwater work so I was able to do both. I took my portfolio coffee table book, changed the name to “Ocean Adventures” and added photos until I  reached 100 pages. I did all the work in Adobe InDesign and then used the page exporter utility to export each page as a full-sized jpeg. Here is a link to the finished book. Be patient when viewing. It is a big file and takes a little time to load. Anyone that might be interested in that book in future, please send me an email and I will put you on a list and email you when MyPublisher runs that same deal again. Without the deal, the book would have cost $227.00.

A few more tips on book layout and they pertain to two page spreads. The only way to do it in most self-publishing software is to layout the double page design in a photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop or a layout program like Adobe InDesign and save each half page as a high quality jpeg and insert each into a page in the book publishing software. This is all well and good but not all photos work well on two pages.

Here is an example of a photo that does not work although I did not realize it until I received my copy of the book. If there is something going on in the center of the page, it probably won’t work well for a two-page spread.

This photo definitely look better here than in the book.

Here are a few photos that work very well.

You can see more two-page spreads in my “Ocean Adventures” book. Well, my book publishing quest continues. I am still trying to find a publisher for my New Jersey – The Underwater Garden State. I hope that I find one. If not, I may seriously look into self-publishing the book. I have printed one hard copy so far and it looks really good. I now have a printed book from Blurb and a few from MyPublisher. I will talk about quality in another blog.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Click on the link at the bottom of the page to go to a page that shows the book in a one or two page format. Before you click, look at the short explanation about the page controls.

If you hold your mouse over the control, a text box will describe the operation of the tool. There are only a few, so here they are:

Click on the left pointing arrow to go to the previous page

Click on the right facing arrow to go to the next page

Show thumbnails of the pages. Once available, click on any page to go there.

Show the book full screen, which is the best mode to see it.

Zoom in and out from double page mode to single page mode.

Go the first page (cover) of the book.

Go to the previous page.

Go to the next page.

Go to the last page (back cover).

I have not tried this book viewing program with more than a few people at a time. If you have problems with it, please let me know. Please be patient and let each page load. I would appreciate any feedback that you might have.  Enjoy! Click on the photo below to go to the book or click here.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.